I used to walk with friend who knew every plant in every hedgerow. He would name five different ferns on a bank and point out a wild flower growing in an unexpected place. He made me realise I was ignorant of the language of the natural world. I could not identify beyond the everyday, birds, trees, plants and insects; I was ignorant of the variations in geology and habitat. I was like a child who enjoys pictures in a book but is ignorant of the words on the page.
I am also a romantic, trying to free himself from the prison of a logical, science-orientated mind. I cling, almost in desperation, to the hope there is a hidden, mystical something beyond an indifferent, physical universe. A favourite poem is Emily Dickinson’s, This world Is Not Conclusion which finishes with – “narcotics cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul.”
So, to The Peregrine by J A Baker. For this romantic, countryboy it was a magical, inspirational and even spiritual read. It scratches where I itch. Baker uses language like an artist, dipping his pen into the lexicon as a painter dips his brush into the spectrum. The intense prose-poetry of The Peregrine, creates images that stop you in your tracks, some so surreal that they make no sense – like standing in front of a cubist painting.
Baker became obsessed with the peregrine. For 10 years he followed it through the coastal countryside of Essex, writing his observations in journals he later condensed into to the book, written as diary entries beween Autumn and Spring.
High tide was at three o’clock, lifting along the southern shore of the estuary. Snipe shuddering from the dykes. White glinting water welling in, mouthing the stones of the seawall. Moored boats pecking at the water. Dark red glasswort shining like drowned blood.
Fact & Fantasy
In her essay "The New Biography", Virginia Woolf discusses how the desire for factual truth can squeeze the life out of it's subject. She says the biographer Sir Sidney Lee's life of Shakespeare is dull and his life of Edward the 7th is unreadable because they are both stuffed with truth. But Lee has failed to choose those truths which transmit personality. She wonders if the granite-like solidity of truth and the rainbow-like intangibility of personality can really be welded together into a seamless whole. The Peregrine seeks to make this difficult synthesis, mixing the granite of factual observation with the intangebility of Baker's rainbow vision.
YouTube review: YouTube Better Than Food (well worth a watch)
JA Baker Website
RPH: When you open that book you ask what is? What is going on? What passion is he bringing to bear? I think he falls in love with a Peregrine; he is infatuated.
“Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.”
Autumn rises into the bright sky. Corn is down. Fields shine after the harvest…. Sunlight glints…. The Heron blinds the white river cornea with the spear of his bill. ….The hawk flies quickly upward to the breaking clouds. Swerving and twisting away from the misty lower air, he rises to the first faint warmth of the sun. feels delicately fore wing-hold in the sheer fall of the sky. He is a tiercel lean and long and supple-winged the first of the year.
High tide was at three o’clock, lifting along the southern shore of the estuary. Snipe shuddering from the dykes. White glinting water welling in, mouthing the stones of the seawall. Moored boats pecking at the water. Dark red glasswort shining like drowned blood.
Fact & Fantasy
A criticism of The Peregrine from birdwatchers is that many of Baker's descriptions run counter to the facts. Discussing this issue, Conor Mark Jameson, a feature writer, author and conservationist, writes this in his blog "Finding J A Baker":
Baker saw unusual things, in unusual ways. He describes Peregrines as ‘yellower’ than Kestrels. If that’s how he saw the world, then that’s how he saw it. I believe these lines from The Peregrine contains the key to his modus operandi:
“Everything I describe took place while I was watching it, but I do not believe that honest observation is enough. The emotions and behaviour of the watcher are also facts, and they must be truthfully recorded.”
Baker saw unusual things, in unusual ways. He describes Peregrines as ‘yellower’ than Kestrels. If that’s how he saw the world, then that’s how he saw it. I believe these lines from The Peregrine contains the key to his modus operandi:
“Everything I describe took place while I was watching it, but I do not believe that honest observation is enough. The emotions and behaviour of the watcher are also facts, and they must be truthfully recorded.”
Jameson also writes the Forward to 50th anniversary edition of The Peregrine in which he again considers the objections to the book. His defense of Baker is robust; he calls the charges of deception and fraud "irrelevant" to Baker's project. He says. "The whole of Baker's work is shot through with an almost forensic concern for truthfulness about his encounters with birds, nature and landscape.."
Werner Herzog, the film director, speaking about The Peregrine, says, facts do not consitute truth. Truth is something deeper that awakens a feeling of ecstasy. He says, "The Peregrine is not a book about watching a bird, it's a book about becoming a bird." (part of this discussion below)
Baker is reaching for a language beyond observation. He writes with an almost religious fervour, as though the Essex landscape is a place of worship and he needs to forge a litany of praise to the bird he so reveres. As he strives to capture what amounts to a spiritual devotion, he bends language, stretches meaning and crafts vivid images that do not just beguile and assault the mind of the reader but also enrich the soul. He invites us to stand with him in a muddy field, crouch behind a frosty hedge, gaze out over a marsh, search the sky and see deeper and know more profoundly the elusive world of the Peregrine.
YouTube review: YouTube Better Than Food (well worth a watch)
JA Baker Website
Werner Herzog in discussion with the writer Robert Pogue Harrison at Stanford University
WH: He writes in the prose which we have not seen since Joseph Conrad's short stories. We have not seen anything like that and that's why I find this a very, very decisive book for anyone who wants to make films. By the way, for anyone who is becoming a writer, you have to read it, learn it, learn the whole book by heart.
RPH: When you open that book you ask what is? What is going on? What passion is he bringing to bear? I think he falls in love with a Peregrine; he is infatuated.
WH: Yes, it's an ecstasy; that's one of the things that really caught my attention because, there's always a question particularly in documentary filmmaking, of what constitutes a deeper truth? Sometimes in poetry you have the instant sense that there's a deep truth. Don't, don't analyse it and dissect it in academic terms with the tools of literary theory. Just don't do that. Same thing with films.
Because today what you see, and in what I hear constantly from colleagues is they believe wrongly that facts constitute truth and they do not. Facts at best create norms but only truth is something that illuminates us, that carries us into some sort of an ecstasy. That is something which I find in every second page in in the Peregrine, and there is a quasi-religious quality in his evocation of the peregrine falcon.
RPH: The question is of course is how much is factual. Is the book full of factual inaccuracies?
WH: Maybe a few, but what I keep saying in movie making. if it’s the accountant’s truth you're after, you'll get a straight “A” - you idiot! In the very intelligent, beautiful forward, it says this is irrelevant for The Peregrine is not a book about watching a bird, it's a book about becoming a bird.
You see this quite often in the book. He writes how the Peregrine is soaring higher and higher and becomes a dot in this incredible sky. And then he writes: “then we swooped down”. We swooped down as if he had become a peregrine himself. Sure, it's a factual inaccuracy and yes, count it, become an accountant. That's where you should be.
The ornithologist should be denied to read this book.
RPH. Alright, I have to make a case for facts and. A quote from Henry David Thoreau, in a passage from Walden he says:
"If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a scimitar, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career." Be it life or death, we crave only reality.”
WH: No, I crave many other things beyond reality. It's a very impoverished life if we go only for that. …. Its truth that gives you illumination and transports you into a state where you step outside of your own existence into an ecstasy. You can for example find it in the writings of late mediaeval mystics. That's a beauty of this book.
Cythnia Raven wrote a report on this dicussion.
She is not convinced by Herzog's argument. Nevertheless she writes:
The Peregrine is undeniably a masterpiece, but it raises questions about artistic truth, “real” truth, and what, exactly, Baker was doing. ...... I’m convinced that these issues make the book more, not less, interesting, and raise fascinating questions about the process of creation.
From the Afterword to 50th anniversary edition, by Robert Macfarlane
The story of the Peregrine's writing is remarkable and has a mystery at its heart. For around a decade, from 1954 to 1964, a myopic, arthritic office worker from Essex called John Alec Baker tracked the peregrine falcons that hunted over the landscape of his county. He pursued them on bicycle and on foot, watching through binoculars as they bathed, flew, stooped, killed and roosted.
A bird’s jizz is its gist and vibe, the aggregation of its particulars into a compound signature of life. Baker's style has its own jizz. I think I could encounter the sentence of his prose anywhere and identify it immediately as his.
Adjectives and nouns wrenched into verbs, surreal similes, flaring adverbs. These are among the specifics that make up its unique gestalt.
His Essex is landscape on acid: supersaturations of colour, wheeling phantasmagoria, dimensions blown out and falling away, nature as hyper-nature.
Early in The Peregrine, Baker describes a dunlin being taken by a falcon that approaches it from behind at greater speed. “The dunlin”, he writes, “seemed to come slowly back to the hawk. It passed into his dark outline and did not reappear.” The image is space operatic, a small craft caught in a larger craft’s tractor beam and drawn relentlessly in.
Baker’s book possesses a compatible traction. It hooks into its readers, and they pass involuntarily into it. It is one of the few books I know that leaves no one indifferent. By no means everyone likes it.
But no one doubts the book's bleak bite. The Peregrine cannot be passively consumed. It sticks in the craw, rapes the mind.
Hertzog was asked about making a feature film of The Peregrine and he said, “A feature film would be very wrong. There are texts that should never be touched. In fact, whoever tries to make a feature film of The Peregrine should be shot without trial.”
I wrote a preface to a 2004 edition of the book and described it, not as a book about watching a bird, but a book about becoming a bird. However, I no longer believe that. It is more accurate to say it is a book about failing to become a bird. It is true that Baker longs for the deterritorialised experience of falcons, wishing as they do, to live in a pouring away world of no attachment, and there are numerous moments of extreme identification, such as when he finds himself crouching over a kill like a mantling hawk.
But these ecstatic moments are always followed by Baker’s wounding awareness of his anchorage in a crabbed human body. Again and again, subject object distance is almost closed, only to yawn wide again. The books desolation arises in part from this futile longing for a magical metamorphosis.
The story of the Peregrine's writing is remarkable and has a mystery at its heart. For around a decade, from 1954 to 1964, a myopic, arthritic office worker from Essex called John Alec Baker tracked the peregrine falcons that hunted over the landscape of his county. He pursued them on bicycle and on foot, watching through binoculars as they bathed, flew, stooped, killed and roosted.
A bird’s jizz is its gist and vibe, the aggregation of its particulars into a compound signature of life. Baker's style has its own jizz. I think I could encounter the sentence of his prose anywhere and identify it immediately as his.
Adjectives and nouns wrenched into verbs, surreal similes, flaring adverbs. These are among the specifics that make up its unique gestalt.
- 5000 Dunlin rained away inland like a horde of beetles, gleamed with golden chitin.
- The north wind brittled icily in the pleached lattice of the hedges.
- Four short-eared owls soothed out of the gorse.
- A wood pigeon dead on a winters field glows purple and grey like broccoli.
His Essex is landscape on acid: supersaturations of colour, wheeling phantasmagoria, dimensions blown out and falling away, nature as hyper-nature.
Early in The Peregrine, Baker describes a dunlin being taken by a falcon that approaches it from behind at greater speed. “The dunlin”, he writes, “seemed to come slowly back to the hawk. It passed into his dark outline and did not reappear.” The image is space operatic, a small craft caught in a larger craft’s tractor beam and drawn relentlessly in.
Baker’s book possesses a compatible traction. It hooks into its readers, and they pass involuntarily into it. It is one of the few books I know that leaves no one indifferent. By no means everyone likes it.
But no one doubts the book's bleak bite. The Peregrine cannot be passively consumed. It sticks in the craw, rapes the mind.
Hertzog was asked about making a feature film of The Peregrine and he said, “A feature film would be very wrong. There are texts that should never be touched. In fact, whoever tries to make a feature film of The Peregrine should be shot without trial.”
I wrote a preface to a 2004 edition of the book and described it, not as a book about watching a bird, but a book about becoming a bird. However, I no longer believe that. It is more accurate to say it is a book about failing to become a bird. It is true that Baker longs for the deterritorialised experience of falcons, wishing as they do, to live in a pouring away world of no attachment, and there are numerous moments of extreme identification, such as when he finds himself crouching over a kill like a mantling hawk.
But these ecstatic moments are always followed by Baker’s wounding awareness of his anchorage in a crabbed human body. Again and again, subject object distance is almost closed, only to yawn wide again. The books desolation arises in part from this futile longing for a magical metamorphosis.
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